In my current startup we spend 2-3 hours every week running those meetings and I find them really boring... We do things like breaking down stories into subtasks, debating the estimation of each ticket, etc... It just generates so much (imo) unnecessary discussions about seemingly trivial tasks like building a new footer. I understand that trivial tasks can get complicated at scale but now we end up with extremely slow velocity because we spent so much time debating, pairing, etc... I felt like we are barely getting anything done.
Imagine everyone doing their own thing. Not communicating. Ton of redundancies. Not knowing who to ask what. Who is working on what and when it should be done because your part is dependent on their part. List goes on and on. With small teams where people need to wear multiple hats, I find it crucial to plan shit out together and then divide and conquer. With larger teams, it’s easier for the weak links or people who want to coast by to hide and extend out when shit will get done.
2-3 hours seem like a small price to pay if it can prevent bad quality tickets that are unclear or overlap or untestable or don't sufficiently cover everything that needs to be done, which can easily cost you anything from 2-3 days or weeks of extra work.
I also think it is useless and boring. Quickly left that place and glad I don’t have to do it anymore.
It’s worse in bigger companies. Layers upon layers of quarterly planning with very little actually getting done in that quarter.
Debating trivial tasks before you build them is so much better than spending 6 weeks building something only to hear “this is great, let’s change everything!!” 2-3 hours isn’t bad. We were originally tasked to do a 2 hour sprint planning, 2 hours backlog grooming, 1 hour retrospective per sprint (2 week sprints) The people in our team have gotten good at breaking down stories before getting to sprint planning so our meeting time has gone down significantly.
You could actually try to participate. Planning with the team is the way the dev team actually gets to take ownership of the work they'll be accountable for. Read the SCRUM guide...it is like 20 pages...and see what problems they were trying to solve. It might make that meeting look good in comparison.
I think it's important to do the scrum ceremonies. However, I think the team has to make a effort to keep it relevant. Sometimes we start discussing about implementation details that goes on and on, or topics that doesnt belong to planing.
Most people will find it very demoralizing to work on something only for it to not ship. Yeah sprint meetings might suck but it’s better than having your entire part of the project thrown away.
In some companies engineers don’t even show up for sprint planning and scrum ceremonies. The manager has to individually call them on their phones or slacks them. Punctual ones feel like idiots. Not sure if this happens in most teams at Paypal but am part of one such team that is dysfunctional
Only for novices